Oracle has answered IBM's announced $1 billion purchase of database management outfit Informix with a migration program for Informix users "who are searching for performance, scalability and database innovation not available with IBM DB2."

The fourth annual Integrators Forum (now called System Builders Summit Europe) takes place on May 16-19 in Monte Carlo. This will gather the top 200 system builders in Europe from 26 countries, representing more than 30 per cent of the European market.

In a brief SEC filing Linux distributor has announced that it will lay off 32 of its 188 staff ahead of closing its acquisition of SCO's Server and Services businesses. Caldera will take a one-time charge of $450,000, about half of its quarterly income.

AOL, Microsoft’s biggest customer for Internet Explorer by a long chalk, finally seems on the brink of kissing the software goodbye - or alternatively, it’s just playing a little hard-ball. According to AOL documentation obtained by BetaNews, AOL staff have been busily compiling a list of IE-related sins committed by Microsoft, apparently in order to justify a split.

If you ever thought that the political shenanigans of the self-appointed guardians of the Internet, the ICANN "directors", should be made into a play or sitcom, you'll be delighted to see this cartoon that a Reg reader has just pointed us to.

Europe's 3G disaster could be mitigated by getting phone users to spend a little longer each day on the phone talking. That's the opinion of AT&T Labs researcher says Andrew Odlyzko, author of the justifiably celebrated research paper Content Is Not King.

Vodafone is facing the prospect of another set of profit warnings after it admitted 12 per cent of its customers are "inactive" and haven't used their phones for three months. It also said that those still using their phones are spending less. Worldwide, eight million of its 83 million customers are "ghost" users.

Steve Husty, a senior software engineer who works for NASA on the portable computer systems used on the International Space Station, has written to correct us on aspects of our story about the failure of computers aboard the International Space Station. In the process he's provided us with an interesting explanation of the technology on the space station which we've published below.

We're only going to go for you if you're very naughty indeed, says source...

Product Activation is probably the major doubt hanging over Windows XP, and it's therefore to be expected that people from within Microsoft will attempt to defend it. This week, HardOCP has an email which presumably emanates from a Microserf, and which seems to have sufficient background information about product activation for it to looks like the real thing.

After once again describing 2000 as "the most successful year in AMD's history" (sales grew 63 per cent), Sanders took questions from the floor today at a shareholder's meeting in New York. Topics ranged from 0.13 micron technology, his forthcoming resignation, flash memory, and Intel advertising.